I walked into the office a few minutes late and sat down on the sofa. I pulled the leather journal my husband gave me for Christmas out of my purse. I had already prepared a list on one of the yellow pages. I’d written in purple ink all the things that had happened over the last month which I needed help processing.

Christmas had been especially nasty: cruelty, loneliness, tears, wishing for death, wishing I had never been born into the world in the first place. Then came January with its new beginnings, except all the same old shit remained. I didn’t bother with resolutions or words to focus on throughout the year.

So when I sat down on the sofa, I was a bit bleary-eyed from the haze of the last month. I verbally vomited out my list, surprisingly without tears to accompany.

She acknowledged that it sounded like the holidays had, indeed, been difficult for me — that they are often difficult for many people. We discussed how the events of the holidays can stir up a variety of emotions in people and how January can include a bit of recovering.

January is most certainly a difficult month. The holiday decorations come down and get packed away. If there was any magic in the season, it disappears with a frigid, January winter. We wearily and begrudgingly go back to work and school and routines and schedules. But as my counselor said, “January’s going to end. Then, February will come.”

Yes, thank goodness, January is going to end, and the holidays will become a distant memory. We’ll be past the fog of holiday hangover. We’ll look forward with anticipation to the life that springs up with warmer weather.

For some of us, with all the new year, new you, new opportunity, new, new, new emphasis, we forget to give ourselves time to recuperate and recover from an emotionally-laden month. Maybe it’s okay not to rush into the newness of a new year, but to take the month of January to process. January is going to end; it won’t last forever. February will come, and maybe then, we can muster up the energy to jump on the new-everything bandwagon.